Thoughtful writers like Thomas Friedman, Bob Herbert, and Paul Krugman are just a few of the high profile voices advancing the notion that clean energy technologies must play a key role in the American economy if the country is going to position itself to compete globally with China (among others).

They also convincingly make the case that pursuing a renewable energy strategy is a matter of national security. As the private and public sectors begin to move aggressively in this direction, the demand for land to accommodate the expansion of physical infrastructure required by clean energy project advocates becomes increasingly acute. In this sense, a green thread binds renewable energy production to brownfields development and, with each passing day, the twin drivers of a flattened global economy and America’s addiction to oil from petro-dictatorships makes the bind tighter and the relationship more intimate and necessary.

This dynamic—and the growing need for readily usable land for facility siting that doesn’t consume wetlands, degrade stormwater, or promote sprawl—validates and underscores EPA’s and DOE’s interest and investment in aligning the brownfields redevelopment community with the renewable energy community. It also translates into a strong market proxy for conventional real estate demand, creating, even in this brutal economic environment, new transactional, consulting, redevelopment, job training, and community building opportunities for a broad range of brownfields actors.

Still, notwithstanding the fact that the stage is set for a deep brownfields building boomlet, there is a very real risk that these opportunities won’t be fully realized.

Recently, Thomas Friedman, in writing about China’s success in taking a leading role in the energy technology revolution, referred to an astute observation made by Andy Grove, the co-founder of Intel, to highlight a vexing challenge now facing American politicians and legislators. Grove has said that companies come to “strategic inflection points,” where the “fundamentals of a business change [means] they either make the hard decision to invest in a down cycle and take a more promising trajectory or do nothing and wither.”

It could be argued that both private brownfield developers and non-federal environmental regulators are at just such a strategic inflection point with contaminated property redevelopment. It’s not so much that the fundamentals of our business have changed, rather it’s that the Great Recession has taken us to a moment in time where the evolution of our fundamentals is at a pause and, if and when the real estate down-cycle lifts, we can go one of two ways—backwards or forwards.

Prudence, propriety needed
On the non-federal regulator side, the bedrock brownfields principle of state and local agency officials partnering in good faith with private sector development advocates is starting to fray, and there seems to be the beginning of a roll back to a much bleaker and adversarial time.

Accordingly, to ensure the private sector is properly motivated to invest in the national economic and security imperative of energy-oriented development on contaminated sites, state and local regulators will need to double down on their investment in brownfields by becoming more bureaucratically efficient, by finding ways to expand liability protection, and by recommitting institutionally to a true partnership approach.

As for the private sector, our inflection challenge is this: In the rush to explore the potential for utilizing the national inventory of brownfield sites to accelerate the expansion of America’s renewable energy capacity, we must remain sensitive to the health and economic needs of disempowered and disenfranchised neighborhoods, which have historically suffered disparately from industrial siting, permitting, and operations.

In 2006, Bob Herbert famously wrote, “the systematic placement of garbage dumps, chemical plants, oil refineries, and other hazardous facilities in communities inhabited primarily by blacks and other disadvantaged groups is nothing less than an unconscionable extension of the devastating Jim Crow policies that have existed in one form or another, legally or illegally, since slavery.” The imperative of clean energy-oriented development cannot be used as cover to wage environmental injustice anew on minority neighborhoods that are economically overmatched.

To be clear, the inflection point here is not the fact that the opportunity exists to serendipitously leverage the demand for renewable energy as a platform for accelerating brownfields redevelopment; rather it’s in how the public and private sector embrace such opportunity. That is, will this new and powerful springboard for investment and transactions take us back to a less productive and more contentious time or forward to a place of consensus among and equity for all stakeholders?

Invoking the words of yet another insightful commentator of his time, William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming: “What model for energy oriented reuse of contaminated sites, its hour come round at last, slouches towards our nation’s economic stability and geopolitical security to be fully realized?”

Michael Goldstein is an environmental attorney with a principal focus on the reuse of contaminated sites for renewable energy production. He can be reached at mgoldstein@goldbrowngroup.com